Be careful who you hire to ruin your reputation

I’ve mentioned this before about hiring people to leave comments in your name to get back-links to your site. This is committing on-line reputation suicide. Having your reputation on-line ruined is bad enough, but paying someone to do it for you is even worse.

In the past few days a series of comments have been rolling into the Lab on old posts. I mean really old post going back to the end of 2006. The first couple that came in I figured were newbie readers. One even said he was new and reading older posts. However since Monday, (this is Thursday) I’ve started getting a lot of comments from various individuals all on older posts.

This sets off a red flag. The naming convention was the same for each:

Yes, those are the actual names on the comments. And they all came from the same IP address.

None of these comments will be approved, nor will any future comments coming from this source be approved.

Being a do follow blog means I want to provide a link back to those that contribute to the discussion. It also mean those that try to abuse this courtesy are as bad as BP company executives; No, they are worse.

Yes, there are a few that build their rankings by providing good content. Unfortunately, new bloggers go to conferences or read articles telling them to build back-links by leaving comments on Do-follow blogs. Then there are those companies that sell them the “service”.

When the real answer is to post good content and do it often.

I don’t read a lot of blogs. Then ones I do I rarely leave a comment. Honestly I doubt I leave a dozen comments a YEAR.

We need to see this addressed in REBarCamps and at NAR conferences when Blogging is the topic. Otherwise the spam comments will keep on coming. I turn on auto delete the spam filter and black list ip addresses that I know are companies leaving spam comments. They stop leaving them after a while when they see they aren’t being posted.